Julia Kaltenborn

Pronouns: she/her
Location: Kanienʼkehá꞉ka / Ho-de-no-sau-nee-ga / Montreal

I am a PhD Student at McGill University and Mila - Quebec AI Institute under the academic advise of Prof. David Rolnick. I fast-tracked from McGill’s MSc Computer Science program and hold a BSc in Cognitive Science by the Osnabrück University. During my BSc I studied abroad in Japan at 中央大学, and back in Germany taught students old-fashioned AI - with Prolog. Later on, I forecasted river levels at the INRS, classified snowpacks for MOSAiC (the largest polar expedition in history) at the SLF, and tracked cyclones at the Climate Modeling Alliance at Caltech.

My research focuses on:

• Machine Learning for Climate Modeling
• Machine Learning for Cryospheric Sciences

I have been a fellow of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation throughout my studies, received the Mitacs Globalink Research Fellowship, and was a DeepMind scholar.

Beyond research, I have been engaged in climate action for most of my life, and co-founded the NGO Unser Dialog. Last but not least, I am a proud participant of the Juneau Icefield Research Expedition and have traversed the icefield in 2023.

Current Research

Currently, I am a visiting PhD student at the Snow- and Avalanche Research Institute in Davos, Switzerland, under the supervision of Tiziano Di Pietro and Dr. Martin Schneebeli. I am involved in the data campaign planning, field work, and ML development for snowpack stability prediction.

I also continue to work on ClimateSet (A Large-Scale Climate Model Dataset for ML) and our endeavor to super-emulate CMIP6. Moreover, I am putting a team together for reviewing ML in Cryospheric sciences, and building a connected ML4Cryo community.